The year 2000 marked an important milestone for the global dispersal of intersectionality. In the new millennium, intersectionality entered an era of internationalization by moving into international diplomacy and human rights governance. Intersectionality also gained wider academic acceptance within and beyond the English-speaking world, earning it the label of a fast travelling theory (Knapp 2005). Today, digital and social media constitute one of the most vibrant scenes of intersectionality where a new generation of activists, artists, and scholars debate its intellectual and political significance.
By examining three important channels of diffusion and cross-fertilization, this chapter explores this broad dispersal of intersectionality as a form of critical inquiry and praxis. First, the chapter traces intersectionality's global dispersal within human rights and equality policy arenas. An important shift has occurred, one where intersectional analyses of social inequality no longer occur solely within national policy frameworks. Instead, human rights perspectives increasingly draw upon intersectionality as an analytic tool to address social inequality within a global context.
Second, by focusing on intersectional scholarship, the chapter builds on earlier conversations about intersectionality's entrance into the academy and its institutional incorporation. Intersectional frameworks have changed the terms of scholarly conversation across many fields of study. Because intersectional scholarship is too vast to be surveyed here, the chapter identifies some important issues to consider.
Finally, intersectionality has travelled into digital media. New information and communications technologies (ICTs) have changed the terrain of intellectual production and political action for individuals, nation-states, businesses, and social movements. Intersectionality has become a hotly debated topic on the Web. We present a small sample of this material.
Overall, this chapter examines how intersectional frameworks have travelled into three very different interdependent venues that place different emphases on inquiry and praxis. Stated differently, these three cases illustrate the synergy between intersectionality as a form of inquiry and as critical praxis.
The preparations for the 2001 United Nations World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in Durban, South Africa played an important role in intersectionality's dispersal in human rights venues. In May 2000, the first United Nations Preparatory Committee that took place in Geneva included representatives from Brazil, India, Portugal, United Kingdom, Israel, Guatemala, Philippines, Mali, and Uganda. This committee invited Kimberlé Crenshaw to present a position paper and organize a training workshop (Crenshaw 2000). Following the Geneva meeting, references to intersectionality in the international arena became increasingly common. For example, in December 2000, the Citizen's Conference Against Racism and Preparatory Intergovernmental Meeting of the Americas in Santiago, Chile, also preparing for WCAR, introduced intersectional frameworks into UN human rights agendas. Other groups also prepared for Durban by commissioning background papers, some of which contributed to intersectionality's dissemination in UN human rights venues. For example, a background paper commissioned by the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission analyzed intersectional oppression in relation to race and sexual orientation.
Kimberlé Crenshaw's involvement in preparatory work for the World Conference Against Racism made a major contribution to intersectionality's dispersal in global venues. Crenshaw's background paper was crucial for the history of intersectionality:
it marks the inclusion of intersectional theory, research, and politics at the highest levels of international diplomacy. Though it may be an overstatement to call this “mainstreaming,” because the uptake of Crenshaw's recommendations have been mixed, the consideration of intersectionality at the level of the UN and in more than rhetoric signifies an undeniable degree of political legitimacy and recognition for the movement. Furthermore, Crenshaw's work for the UN (among other human rights and social justice organizations) embodies key tenets of Black feminists' original configuration of intersectionality as an activist project for social transformation.
(Grzanka 2014: 16−17)
The importance of Durban for intersectionality's global reach cannot be overstated. Imagine some 10,000 delegates from all around the world, with women in the majority, learning about each other's struggles. Representatives from the South African landless movement, the Dalit struggle in India for the rights of lower-caste groups, indigenous movements, and the Intifada, the Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation, all attended. These representatives brought multi-issue frameworks that reflected the complexity of their lived experiences and political struggles. Whether the term “intersectionality” was used or some other terms captured its essence, intersectionality gained a global platform for dissemination and development.
The full title of the conference, The United Nations World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, was itself historic. The term “related intolerance” linked racism to its intersections with poverty, gender discrimination, immigration, and homophobia. After decades of struggle to gain recognition for the gendered impacts of racism, xenophobia, and violence, this meeting was the first UN-sponsored conference against racism to include “related intolerance” (Blackwell and Naber 2002: 240).
By 2000, the core elements of intersectionality were already present within the international human rights arena (Yuval-Davis 2006). The World Conference Against Racism drew upon the ideas expressed in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Intersectionality seemingly aligned with existing UN policy prescriptions for equal rights and anti-discrimination. Article 1 of the 1948 Declaration affirms that all human beings “are born free and equal in dignity and rights”; and Article 2 states that everyone “is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.”
Feminist activism for women's rights, as well as feminist preparations for the 2001 World Conference Against Racism and the activities of the conference itself, were important in heightening interest in intersectionality within UN circles (Grzanka 2014; Yuval-Davis 2006). The World Conference Against Racism could build on prior UN conferences on the status of women. The Beijing Declaration at the Fourth World Conference on Women (1995) constitutes one of the earliest translations of the idea of intersectionality, though not the term, into UN language. The declaration asks governments to “intensify efforts to ensure equal enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms for all women and girls who face multiple barriers to their empowerment and advancement because of such factors as their race, age, language, ethnicity, culture, religion or disability or because they are indigenous people” (United Nations 1995).
In many countries, in particular those with substantial racial/ethnic diversity, preparations among women's organizations for WCAR drew more attention to internal differences and tensions, as well as to the exclusions of dominant strands of feminism prevailing in the country. The Afro-Brazilian Women's movement was engaged in a long-standing effort to bring a black feminist movement into being and grappled with issues of dealing with both the Black Movement and the mainstream Brazilian feminist movement (Carneiro 2002). Just as the Afro-Brazilian movement developed its own analysis of its own needs and goals, one that drew upon intersectionality as inquiry and critical praxis, other local, regional, and national women's groups engaged in similar projects. These movements aimed to address the social problems associated with global social inequality. They recognized the particular constellations of power relations of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, age, ability, and citizenship categories in their specific social contexts. And this recognition enabled many of them to negotiate the political differences that separated them. The Afro-Brazilian women's movement is not unusual in this regard, but it does provide a closer look inside the political projects of groups as they prepared for WCAR.
Despite these differences, or perhaps because of them, the preparations for the conference paid off. Article 119 of NGO Forum Declaration at the 2001 World Conference Against Racism included a definition of an intersectional approach to discrimination:
[It] acknowledges that every person be it man or woman exists in a framework of multiple identities, with factors such as race, class, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, citizenship, national identity, geo-political context, health, including HIV/AIDS status and any other status are all determinants in one's experiences of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerances. An intersectional approach highlights the way in which there is a simultaneous interaction of discrimination as a result of multiple identities.
This statement marked a watershed moment for intersectionality's global dispersal. Yet the gains of Durban were larger than its declarations and official documents. The process enabled feminists around the globe to articulate race, gender, and poverty with human rights (Falcon 2012).
Incorporating intersectionality into an overarching global human rights framework gave nation-states a more defined mandate to revisit their equality policies. Across different ideological perspectives, e.g., neoliberal, democratic, or socialist, governments constitute primary sites where human rights policies and practices take form. In 2000, the European Union (EU) adopted legally binding directives about discrimination on the grounds of race and ethnicity, as well as of age, disability, sexual orientation, and religion (Krizsan, Skjeie, and Squires 2012: 2). The adoption of these new directives fostered the spread of a new institutionally integrated approach to discrimination. Across Europe, different national bodies use intersectionality as an analytic tool to shape their public policies concerning equality. In the United Kingdom, the incorporation of gender, race, disability, sexual orientation, religion or belief, and age into equal opportunities and diversity legislation has led to the creation of a new single equality body for Great Britain (England, Scotland, and Wales) (Bagilhole 2010). The adoption of new directives prompted equality policy reforms in many countries – some of them creating new equality bodies that would enforce equality legislation on all prohibited grounds of discrimination. The British Equality and Human Rights Commission, for example, gathers under one roof efforts to challenge discriminations based on gender, race, disability, age, religion or belief, and sexual orientation or transgender status. Policy analysts often look to intersectionality as a new institutional model to address multiple or complex inequalities. Thus mainstreaming intersectionality is a significant step forward within the equality policy arena because it helps avoid the dominant single-issue, gender-first approach (Bagilhole 2010; Hankivsky 2007).
The policy prescriptions of the UN's trajectories and the national policies of EU nation-states show how intersectionality as a form of critical inquiry and praxis is being negotiated on the macro-level of analysis. But putting teeth into policies and legislative mandates requires thinking through how people try to use intersectional frameworks. A closer look at one of many meetings within a global human rights context where people try to figure out how to use intersectionality reveals how challenging using intersectional frameworks can be.
In 2013, approximately 25 people from diverse backgrounds in law, advocacy, and academia assembled in a conference room at the Center for Reproductive Rights at Columbia University's Law School. They had been invited to attend a one-day symposium on “Intersectionality in the Inter-American Human Rights System (IAHRS).” The talent around the table was remarkable, including representatives from organizations such as Wangki Tangni, created to serve the needs of the Miskito community in Nicaragua, Disability Rights International, Amnesty International, Programa de Acción por la Igualdad y la Inclusión Social (Colombia), as well as representatives from law school programs such as the International Women's Human Rights Clinic at the City University of New York Law School, the Human Rights in the US Project, and the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law projects at Columbia University Law School.
The meeting itself was convened by Tracy Robinson (Jamaica) and Rose-Marie Belle Antoine (St Lucia), two elected commissioners representing the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). Robinson and Antoine were responsible for specific areas that would help IACHR monitor compliance of nation-states covered by the Organization of American States (OAS) with inter-American human rights treaties. The Commission was often the first point of contact for petitioners who might pursue human rights claims before the court. As rapporteurs to IACHR assigned to different areas of interest, the two commissioners supervised different areas of human rights concerns. Robinson oversaw activities dealing with the rights of women, as well as the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersexed persons. Antoine served as rapporteur for claims dealing with the rights of Afro-descendants and against racial discrimination as well as the rights of indigenous peoples. The issue that became clear to both Robinson and Antoine was that many human rights claims did not fall squarely into any one of their four areas. Both commissioners recognized that the ways that gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity were understood within the courts limited their ability to bring redress for human rights violations. They decided to work together; the meeting was one step in that process.
Robinson opened the meeting by identifying three important themes that would help commissioners to be more effective in addressing human rights issues. First, she pointed to the need for more effective tools for identifying discrimination. In a world where petitions for human rights violations could be brought under various categories, it was difficult to conceptualize what discrimination meant. When discrimination is legally framed either by sex, gender, or race, how does one best serve people who bring claims that touch on more than one ground of discrimination? Second, Robinson identified the need for better assessments of pain, suffering, and injury. What types of pain and suffering are appropriate for bringing a human rights claim? In what ways do questions of human dignity matter? A third issue concerned the search for appropriate reparations and remedies to victims of human rights abuses. What are state responsibilities if harm has been documented and suffering has occurred?
Commissioners Robinson and Antoine recognized the limitations of a strictly legal statement of human rights, and that the protected categories gained meaning both through intersectional frameworks and their effects on praxis, for example, remedies for people who are harmed. The meeting attendees were charged with the task of analyzing how intersectionality's emphasis on the ways in which axes of social division work together and influence one another might shape human rights. How might intersectionality contribute to better conceptualizations of discrimination, suggest ways to address the damage done by intersecting oppressions, and provide guidance for remedies or redress for human rights violations?
As the day unfolded, participants engaged Robinson's questions, primarily by discussing specific cases that shed light on various dimensions of intersectionality and human rights. Participants presented cases for discussion in sessions on gender and sexuality; gender and race, ethnicity, and migration; and gender and indigenous people. A closer look at actual cases revealed recurring themes. Across many of the cases, actual violence, the threat of violence, variations of state violence, and denial of human dignity re-emerged as core themes. Human rights violations had occurred against women who were raped, or children who were removed from their families by state action, or indigenous people who were displaced from land. Vulnerability was not an absolute category − whereas women were central to the cases selected for presentation, it was clear that the generic category of woman obscured more than it revealed. Specifically, some women were more vulnerable than others if they were indigenous, black, poor, and young. The categories of ethnicity, race, economic status, and age did not line up pristinely.
The cases under consideration showed the success of the Human Rights Court, as well as the challenges of using intersectional frameworks. One could see the workings of intersecting systems of power in shaping the lives of people who had experienced human rights violations as well as the significance of court remedies. For example, the 2005 case of Dilcia Yean and Violeta Bosico v. Dominican Republic claimed human rights violations for two girls of African descent who were rendered stateless by the Dominican Republic's citizenship policies. Born in the Dominican Republic to mothers who were also born in the Dominican Republic, the girls had Haitian fathers and Haitian maternal grandfathers. The Dominican government rejected the girls' mothers' efforts to register their daughters' birth certificates that are required for most things in the Dominican Republic (e.g., cell-phone contracts, school, and marriage). Because no domestic remedies existed in Dominican courts, the case came before the international court. The court also sought guidance concerning three cases that involved the rape of young girls. The three cases of Rosendo Cantú et al. v. Mexico (1994−2001), Fernández Ortega et al. v. Mexico (2001−2010), and Ana, Beatriz and Cecelia González Perez v. Mexico (2002−2010) showed how indigenous peoples became subject to violence during the militarization of Guerrero and Chiapas in Mexico. Recognizing that compensating the individual victims was not enough, two of the cases granted significant reparations at the community level.
The complexities of cases such as these suggested that addressing Commissioner Tracy Robinson's three issues required far more than a one-day meeting. Participants at the meeting faced the challenge of analyzing human rights law and practice in order to see: (1) what intersectionality means and what it requires in terms of government obligations; (2) how it has been applied in practice; and (3) how it can and should be reflected within the IAHRS (through decisions, reports, recommendations, and remedies ordered by the Inter-American Court and the Inter-American Commission). These ideas obviously could not be developed in one day, but the fact that the meeting was held at all provides an important angle of vision on ongoing initiatives within intersectionality as a form of critical inquiry and praxis.
Several features of the meeting highlight the significance of contemporary efforts to examine links between human rights policies, state-based equality policies, and intersectionality's potential contributions. First, intersectionality has expanded beyond the civil rights framework suggested in Crenshaw's early articles (Crenshaw 1989, 1991) to a human rights framework within a transnational context, as explored in her position paper for the Durban conference (Crenshaw 2000). The human rights community is moving beyond civil rights advocacy that petitions the nation-state for redress to human rights advocacy that appeals to international and intergovernmental organizations such as The Hague International Criminal Court. The focus on social issues appears to be the same. What appears to be different is the recognition that the state can no longer lay claim to solving social issues as understood within intersectional frameworks.
Second, the engagement of intersectionality and human rights has potential implications for sharpening conceptions of social issues as potential human rights violations. Advocates for important social issues such as citizenship rights, reproductive justice, the exploitation of child labor, mass incarceration and prisoners' rights, environmental justice, and migrants' rights can claim the ethical protection of the UN Declaration of Human Rights and pursue remedies in organizations such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). Human rights-based frameworks can come with their own sets of problems, such as placing too much reliance on judicial processes or seeing social injustice as an individual versus a collective matter. This is why examining the specific social context of the Symposium on “Intersectionality in the Inter-American Human Rights System” is so important − the social actors around the table recognized the complexities of collective social harm, as well as the limitations of their own ability to remedy harm. As leaders of advocacy organizations, legal scholars, and community organizers, they collaborated in order to see how multiple points of view could produce results.
Third, a significant feature of efforts to develop human rights initiatives informed by intersectionality concerns how people aim to incorporate the ideas of intersectionality into their fields of practice, often by embracing a critical praxis approach. For example, neither lawyers nor heads of advocacy groups nor grassroots activists who attended the Symposium had all the answers. The meeting affirmed the need for collaborative work that takes seriously the points of view of stakeholders on a particular social issue.
Finally, this case exemplifies intersectionality's emphasis on social justice. People who work on violence against women come to grasp that solutions cannot be developed by seeing women as a homogeneous group, or by focusing either on interpersonal relations or on state power as sites of violence. Thus intersectional analyses help illuminate important global trends in the matters of social justice, understanding intersecting power relations, and human rights. Stated differently, intersectionality as a form of critical inquiry cannot flourish by separating itself from its critical praxis.
The evidence of intersectionality's presence within academia is everywhere. By the early 2000s, heightened interest in intersectionality fostered numerous journal articles, special editions of journals, edited volumes, and undergraduate anthologies. Because interest in intersectionality has grown exponentially and expanded in so many directions, many scholars and practitioners are unaware of the breadth of intersectional scholarship. Intersectionality's widespread scholarly dispersal and its effects on academic production, disciplinary traditions and boundaries is a vast subject. Intersectional scholarship takes many forms: books and dissertations that cover a broad range of themes,1 anthologies and edited volumes for undergraduate courses and the general public,2 peer-reviewed and scholarly journal articles,3 and a number of special editions of scholarly journals across various academic disciplines.4
The term intersectionality is certainly being dispersed. Yet one important question facing intersectionality concerns how this dispersal influences the scholarship in the academy. What are some important issues to consider in thinking through patterns of intersectionality's dispersal in scholarship?
One important issue concerns how scholars across academic disciplines and interdisciplinary fields use intersectionality as an analytic tool to rethink important social issues and institutions. Earlier case studies demonstrate how using intersectionality as an analytic lens creates new interpretations of topics such as the FIFA World Cup as a benign sporting event, mainstream perceptions of capitalism (chapter 1), and conceptions of violence that bring together inquiry and praxis (chapter 2). Each illustrates how the questions at hand shape the kind of intersectional analysis that ensues. We also highlight the importance of how ideas that develop within local and global social contexts of praxis, for example, Bonnie Thornton Dill's study of the institutional incorporation of race, gender, and class studies in higher education (chapter 2), the neglect of the ideas of the Combahee River Collective within intersectional scholarship (chapter 3), and honing the meaning of intersectionality in a global human rights framework (this chapter), also make important contributions to scholarship. As we move through this book, we provide additional examples of using intersectionality as an analytic tool. If we assembled our examples and included more, we would find many different intersectional approaches, most tailored to the questions, histories, and pathways taken by various fields. There is no one intersectional framework that can be applied to each field. Rather, varying academic fields of study take up different aspects of intersectionality in relation to their specific concerns.
In some cases, intersectionality provides new direction for rethinking existing areas within a traditional discipline. Take, for example, the ways in which US sociology engaged themes of race, class, and gender. Because American sociology developed in a political and intellectual context of race and gender segregation, the overall organization of the discipline, as well as the core themes and practices of its first hundred years, perceived race, gender, and class as different and seemingly unrelated axes of social division (Collins 2007). Sociological subdisciplines of class, race, and gender understood each area as distinctive and typically paid scant attention to one another. For example, if the study of marriage and the family was “covering” women, why should the subfield of race and ethnicity concern itself with gender? If African-American experience was studied within race, there was no need to include race as a major explanatory framework in either mainstream studies of social stratification or Marxist critiques of it. If the whiteness of immigrant groups was taken as the norm, the assumptions of whiteness that underlay the construct of US ethnicity need not be studied. Rather, class cleavages associated with varying levels of assimilation and upward social mobility could form the focus of investigation. As a result, these long-standing distinctions between sociological subdisciplines of class, race, and gender shaped their analyses of social inequality. Because the sociologists associated with stratification (class), race, and gender worked within social conditions that were segregated, this logic of separation shaped their organization. Thus studies of stratification/class, with their emphasis on dominant understandings of work and occupations, largely reflect the widespread tendency to equate white male experiences with society overall. For race and ethnicity, questions of culture prevailed, especially concepts of assimilation drawn from the experiences of white ethnic groups. For gender, white women found themselves either restricted to the so-called helping profession of social work and/or relegated to their so-called natural sphere of family by studying family. Preoccupied with the level of interpersonal family dynamics, gender analyses remained contained by the language of social psychology and individual social interaction. Overall, the non-intersectional approach of each area limited its ability to consider the ways in which other areas might shape its distinctive concerns.
Intersectionality pushed the boundaries of sociology within the discipline to examine connections between race, class, and gender, as well as sociology's ties with other disciplines. By the 2000s, sociologists had begun to produce important work that used intersectionality as an analytic tool. For example, sociologist Evelyn Nakano Glenn accomplished a sociological synthesis of race, class, gender, and nation in her groundbreaking book Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor (Glenn 2002). Yet the path to this work was not easy. Glenn describes how she cobbled together strands from different fields of study and intellectual traditions for her scholarship:
As I struggle to formulate an integrated analysis of gender, race, and class, I have relied on a historical comparative approach that incorporates political economy while taking advantage of the critical insights made possible by poststructuralism. I use a social constructionist framework, which considers how race, gender, and class are simultaneously constituted in specific locations and historical periods through “racialized” and “genderized” social structure and discourse. I try to inhabit that middle ground …by looking at the ways in which race, gender, and class are constituted relationally.
In this passage, Glenn provides a backstage look at the changing contours of what it meant to do intersectionality within social science. Glenn's work synthesizes areas within sociology − she brings sociological traditions of race, class, gender, and nation together. But she also realizes that interdisciplinary engagements would strengthen her approach to race, class, gender, and nation. She draws upon a “historical comparative approach that incorporates political economy,” a decision that points her toward history, especially labor history and workers' rights. Glenn also takes advantage of the “critical insights made possible by poststructuralism,” an area of social thought that stresses narratives. One important contribution of post-structuralism lay in reviving interest in a “social constructionist framework,” one that is closely aligned with intersectionality's emphasis on power relations. Significantly, Glenn points to the practice of working relationally.
A second issue to consider related to intersectionality's dispersal in scholarship concerns how placing interdisciplinary fields and intersectionality in dialog can raise issues for both. For instance, scholars in critical disability studies use intersectionality to criticize the whiteness of the canon and epistemology of the disability studies field. Conversely, disability studies are used to tackle the absence or the perfunctory use of disability in intersectionality scholarship. This kind of critical cross-conversation has the potential to expand and enrich intersectionality theoretically and epistemologically. For instance, Nirmala Erevelles's work provides an original conceptualization of disability's entanglements with axes of power (2011). Her approach provides a complex frame of relationality in which disability works as an ideological cornerstone for understandings of race, gender, and sexuality. Erevelles situates this complex frame of relationships within global class relations and capitalist modes of production.
Similarly, queer of color scholars use intersectionality to supplement both intersectionality and queer theory (see, e.g., Battle, Cohen, Warren, Fergerson, and Audam 2002; Cohen and Jones 1999; Ferguson 2012). They use intersectionality as an analytic tool to criticize queer theory for its implicit whiteness and its rejection of identities as important political categories. Instead, queers of color see the politically strategic use of collective identities as well as their psychic importance for queer and trans people of color in a racist society with racist LGBTQ communities. Conversely, queer scholars of color use queer theory to challenge the normativity that is found in some intersectionality scholarship. This entails understanding how the term “queer” unsettles the very idea of normal behavior – “queer” hence becomes a set of actions, a verb, not something one is or has. Foregrounding anti-normativity in intersectionality creates space for new questions about how power operates but also for understanding how social hierarchies can be resisted. This understanding of queer also makes it difficult for dominant groups to normalize intersectionality, to assimilate it into “business as usual.” In this sense, these thinkers “queer intersectionality” itself (Bilge 2012).
A third issue to consider related to intersectionality's dispersal in scholarship concerns how dispersal fosters new debates among scholars. Take, for example, the issue of intersectionality's connections to gender and feminism. In North America, where there is a tradition of critical race theory, intersectionality has evolved more holistically, not exclusively as a gender theory. This North American social context that privileges race and nation explains how many scholars take up issues of gender and social class. For example, over the past decade, considerable intersectional scholarship has focused on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. The majority of scholars who take up intersectionality as an analytic lens on Hurricane Katrina emphasized its class and racial politics, pointing to government action or inaction as a marker for nation (see, e.g., Hartman and Squires 2006; Johnson 2011). Gender has been part of the analysis, but it has not been a determining feature of the Hurricane Katrina analysis. Gender need not be central to intersectional analysis. In 2012, for example, Ethnic and Racial Studies published a special edition devoted to the theme “Class, Nation, and Racism in England and Britain.” In a framing essay titled “Thinking Across Domains,” the editors aimed to refocus attention on British national identity and its connection to white racism and to British understandings of class.
At the same time, intersectionality remains strongly associated with women and gender studies, primarily because women's studies faculty and students have been standard-bearers for advancing intersectionality as a form of critical inquiry and praxis in the academy. Despite this prominence, has the attention paid to gender within intersectionality created unexpected problems for intersectionality itself? When Kathy Davis, a prominent feminist thinker, published an article titled “Intersectionality as a Buzzword: A Sociology of Science Perspective on What Makes a Feminist Theory Successful,” her article defined intersectionality as a feminist theory (Davis 2008). Is intersectionality a form of feminist theory, similar to socialist feminism, liberal feminism, or lesbian feminism? Or do feminist theories themselves constitute a gendered analysis that is better categorized under the umbrella of intersectionality?
The ways in which intersectionality is tied to gender are neither obvious nor smooth. This is especially true in Europe, where it has become a cliché to declare intersectionality the brainchild of feminism (Bilge 2013). Take the call for papers for the Italian Review of Sociology for its planned special issue on intersectionality (March 2016) under the editorial direction of two senior sociologists, Enzo Colombo and Paola Rebughini. The call presents intersectionality as follows: “The notion of intersectionality has been present in international debate for at least twenty years, but only in recent times this concept has spread beyond the field of gender studies where it was originally elaborated.” What is notable is that these sociologists acknowledge the potential of intersectionality for disciplinary sociology provided that its analytical range be extended: “The idea of intersectionality represents nowadays an important analytical device in sociological theoretical debate and research not only in gender studies and discrimination, but also in the investigation of social stratification and social agency.”
Finally, dispersal within the academy raises important definitional debates concerning what counts as intersectionality (Collins 2015).5 A renewed focus on methodology constitutes one outcome of these definitional debates within intersectional scholarship. Students, faculty, and scholars who aim to use intersectionality as an analytic lens wonder whether the methods they are using are in fact “intersectional.” For graduate students and researchers, the core question concerns how intersectionality can be conceptualized within a particular research design that is simultaneously attentive to the core themes of intersectionality and that makes a good faith effort to deploy intersectionality as an analytic tool in the face of such uncertainty.6
These definitional debates are far from benign because they speak to what counts as intersectional scholarship and what criteria determine what counts. Seemingly simple questions can foster big controversies. For example, does gender always have to be present for intersectional scholarship to be intersectional enough? Does race always have to be included? Does a study that uses more social divisions, for example, class and sexuality and age and ethnicity, provide a superior approach than a study that uses fewer categories?
New information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been a game changer for both individuals and social movements. The development of Web 2.0 and the spread of applications that go beyond the display of static content foster interactive communities of users who can add, edit, and update content. By transforming the practices and blurring the boundary between producer and consumer, the rise of digital and open media has opened up new spaces for debate. Not surprisingly, a term as visible and contentious as intersectionality has become the object of heated debates in digital spheres. Hence, intersectionality has a noteworthy digital presence, particularly on social media platforms, which provide substantial opportunities for users to create content. Here we examine intersectionality's dispersal through digital media by a close look at three related trends: (1) debates within cyberfeminism that question intersectionality's accessibility to people outside the academy; (2) analogies that seem associated with intersectionality, such as “gay is the new black”; and (3) the shape of a Twitter campaign launched by women of color that criticized the racial politics of feminism and the gender politics of African-American social and political thought.
The contested treatment of intersectionality within cyberfeminism constitutes one site of digital controversy. Digital media, especially social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter that create web-based communities, have changed the face and the average age of feminism. For many feminist groups, writers, and activists, feminism is taking on new forms that have a strong digital presence. In an article in Bluestockings Magazine titled “Is the ‘4th Wave’ of Feminism Digital?,” Ragnar Jónsson contends that digital media, including the blogosphere, digital news media, and social media networks, have entirely changed “the operations, economics, communications, readership, outreach and presentation of feminism” (Jónsson 2013). Despite this expansion, until the early 2000s, cyberfeminism was largely perceived as a set of practices launched by an “educated, white, upper-middle-class, English-speaking, culturally sophisticated readership” within digital media, with references to the intersection of gender and race “exceedingly rare within both cyberfeminist practices and critiques of them” (Fernandez, Wilding, and Wright 2003: 21). Cyberfeminist debates assumed that, because they are viewed as a gender homogeneous category, by implication, digital technologies had to mean the same thing to all women across differences of race, class, and sexuality (Daniels 2009: 103).
More recently, this cyberfeminist perspective on gender and feminism has come under scrutiny, mostly by the steady online presence of feminists of color who have become the key advocates and developers of intersectionality. The popularity of digital magazines and especially of blogs run by feminists of color, such as Colorlines, The Feminist Wire (TFW), Racialicious, the Crunk Feminist, For Harriet, Black Girl Dangerous, and Janet Mock's Blog, shows the vitality and relevance of intersectionality as a form of critical inquiry and praxis for the social justice projects advanced by women, queer/gender non-conforming and trans persons of color. Individuals from these groups offer a wealth of intersectional analyses of topics as varied as popular culture (Racialicious), housing justice, Black History Month (For Harriet), and President Obama's My Brother's Keeper initiative (the Crunk Feminist), or #BlackLivesMatter (TFW).
Within cyberfeminism, debates over intersectionality underscore feminist fault lines that divide along racial lines, although they masquerade occasionally as class divisions, for example, when intersectionality became swept up in feminist reactions to Caitlin Moran's bestselling autobiography (How to Be a Woman, 2011). Defenders of Moran's book decided to show the superiority of Moran's “easy-and-fun” populist feminism by using intersectionality as a straw man. They framed intersectionality as an elitist term, as an “esoteric theory” that was too abstract and abstruse for those outside the ivory tower. Ironically, this charge against intersectionality, made mostly by young white feminist bloggers, is diametrically opposed to white feminist academics' criticism of intersectionality, more prevalent in Europe, that intersectionality is not a “mature theory,” and that it should be “elevated” theoretically (Bilge 2013). Via these strategies, white feminists devalued intersectionality: for its lack of theorizing and for its excess of theorizing, the first argued by disciplinary feminists in the academy and the latter by (self-declared) populist cyberfeminists.
In an October 2012 New Statesman article titled “In Defence of Caitlin Moran and Populist Feminism − Some Educated Women Seem to Want to Keep Feminism for Themselves and Cloak it in Esoteric Theory,” two young white British cyberfeminists defend Moran's book by bashing intersectionality. The authors of the article, Rhiannon Cosslett and Holly Baxter, founding editors of online magazine The Vagenda and the New Stateman's regular feminist blog, The V Spot, argue that “issues of race, class, religion, sexuality, politics and privilege often end up fracturing feminist dialogue, most regularly causing disagreements between those armed with an MA in Gender Studies and a large vocabulary to match, and those without.” For them, intersectionality could not achieve “genuine equality” because, unlike Moran's easy and fun prose, ordinary women found it inaccessible. They argue:
In the last few weeks some have been bandying about the oft-quoted phrase ‘my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit'. We would suggest that anyone with an interest in genuine equality for all adapt that phrase to ‘my feminism will be comprehensible or it will be bullshit.’ Achieving ‘intersectionality’ is impossible unless you can communicate clearly, with everyone. Moran at least speaks a language that we all understand. And how many other feminists can you credit with that?
Ironically, in their criticism of intersectionality, the authors misappropriate the work of a feminist of color, Flavia Dzodan (2011), “My Feminism will be Intersectional or It will be Bullshit!”, without due credit.
Following the controversy that their article raised, in a November 2013 Guardian column titled “I'm a Half-Arsed Accidental Feminist,” Cosslett reasserts intersectionality's alleged inaccessibility. Now she claims to reject the word, not the idea:
Part of our work with the Vagenda has involved visiting schools and universities to chat to young women about just what it is about feminism they find so distasteful. They told […] that feminism is angry and scary and difficult and ‘not for them’, and that feminists aren't feminine or sexy and that they hate men. Frankly, anyone who doesn't think feminism has an image problem or doesn't need “rebranding” […] can't see the nose in front of their face. […] After talking to these young women, we wrote a column criticising academic feminists' use of alienating terms such as “intersectionality” on the basis that most people don't understand them. “Intersectionality” basically means taking into account the way different systems of oppression – race, class, disability, sexual orientation – relate to one another. The article raised issue with the language, not the concept, but because we deigned to criticise the method of communication, we were deemed racist.
Flavia Dzodan (2014) documents how this tactic of “rejecting the term, not the concept” has become common within white cyberfeminism, particularly among gatekeepers. By rejecting the term “intersectionality,” these feminists strip women of color of their conceptual tools and reinforce cultural cloning − “speak our language, use our words” − which also keeps white feminist issues/vocabularies at the forefront of feminist discourse and action:
At the core of this rejection of the word but not “the concept” is a rejection of knowledge produced and developed by Black women and other Women of Color. Since in the face of overwhelming evidence these white feminists cannot deny that racism is alive and kicking, then they will do the next best thing: deprive us of the use of words that help us explain how we are uniquely affected by these power structures. […] at the core of this denial resides an erasure of our tools, the very fabric of the theories and knowledge that explain our lives. […] “Use our words because otherwise our issues will not be front and center.”
(Dzodan 2014; our italics)
The critique of intersectionality among white feminists that took hold of digital media in 2013 and continued in 2014 (particularly acute in the British context) was self-fashioned as a commitment to democratize feminism. Misreading intersectionality as a privileged tool, feminism would be improved by discarding intersectionality, and, by implication, all who advocate for it. One peculiar example from this cyberfeminist debate provides a feel for how threatened some feminists apparently are by intersectionality. In a vitriolic article entitled “Don't You Dare Tell Me to Check My Privilege”, columnist Julie Burchill argues:
intersectionality is actually the opposite of socialism! Intersectionality believes that there is ‘no such thing as society' [à la Margaret Thatcher!] − just various special interests. […] Intersectionality, like identity politics before it, is pure narcissism. […] Here's hoping that the in-fighting in-crowd of intersectionality disappear up their own intersection really soon, so the rest of us can resume creating a tolerant and united socialism.
These two examples show that a new framing is in progress – one that reverses the positions of the privileged and the marginalized within the feminist movement. No longer disenfranchised, women of color become the oppressors of uneducated white women via their alienating word – intersectionality − or get in the way of the socialist dream with their intersectional anthem and flawed identity politics.
Another site of digital controversy concerns the resurrection of the tendency to draw parallels between the experiences of oppressed groups for the purpose of advocating on behalf of one's own group. Under this logic, one need not actually have the experiences of oppression but can appropriate them in the abstract in defense of one's own disadvantage. For example, the claim “gay is the new black,” a new analogy that revamps the old ones and breaches the most basic premise of intersectionality: analogies such as these erase multiply disenfranchised groups. On the surface, this kind of analogy can seem benign, the first step in intersectional engagement where two sides recognize one another's struggles in a move toward solidarity. When Brazilian protesters chant “the love is over, Turkey is right here,” and Gezi protesters proclaim “Everywhere is Taksim, resistance everywhere,” these groups reference each other's struggles as part of a growing transnational solidarity. But this analogy means something entirely different. If gay is the new black, then what about black gay people? Or black lesbians? Or transgender Latinos? Intersectional scholars have argued that this kind of framing through analogy obscures the experiences of people who fall between the cracks of the analogy, the case, for example, of LGBTQ people within African-American communities (Cohen 1999).
After the New York Daily News published an opinion article by John McWhorter entitled “Gay Really is the New Black” (McWhorter 2013), the “gay is the new black” debate gripped the internet. McWhorter's piece generated substantial internet controversy and even earned its own hashtag #GITNB. Yet the catchphrase “gay is the new black” has a longer history. It emerged as a rallying cry within white-dominated gay activism in the context of California's passage of Proposition 8, which would ban same-sex marriage, and get repeated on the cover of the December 16, 2008 issue of The Advocate, the flagship gay publication. The cover proclamation, “Gay is the New Black: The Last Great Civil Rights Struggle,” compared gays' fights for same-sex marriage with the African-Americans' civil rights movement. This assertion relies on a long-standing analogical thought pattern that equates heterosexism to racism.
Criticizing this kind of analogous thinking has been a cornerstone of intersectional thought and praxis. In the nineteenth century, African-American women Sojourner Truth, Anna Julia Cooper, and other activists and educators denounced comparisons of women and blacks. During the 1960s and 1970s, black women criticized their erasure from multiple social movements, an exclusion that catalyzed black feminism. Yet this analogical thinking that categorizes people as being only one thing, continually resurfaces. For example, during the 2008 US electoral campaign, reporters repeatedly asked African-American women the question: “Are you going to vote for Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton? And why?” This question barely masks the real one: “Are you going to vote for Obama because he's black like you or Clinton because she's a woman like you? Which part of yourself is most important?”
Significantly, proclaiming ‘gay is the new black’ buys into the post-race myth that fallaciously declares that racism has lapsed, so we may self-congratulate and move to the next checkbox. “Racism is fixed. Next up? Gay rights.” Seemingly progressive claims like Gay Is The New Black (#GITNB) develop therefore new (anti-intersectional) analogies from the old patterns, which uphold, instead of challenging, the post-racial and post-feminist hegemony espoused by both liberal and conservative forces.
Our last digital debate returns to patterns of exclusion with pre-existing political groups, namely, the lack of race consciousness in mainstream feminism, and the lack of gender consciousness in African-American social movements. In the summer of 2013, black feminist bloggers launched Twitter hashtags that went massively viral. First, there was #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen started by writer Mikki Kendall, followed by #BlackPowerIsForBlackMen initiated by Jamilah Lemieux, digital news and life editor of the magazine Ebony. The first was born out of Kendall's frustration with the complicity of influential white “digital feminists,” such as Jessica Valenti, the founding editor of the blog Feministing.com, the most widely read feminist online publication with a readership of more than six hundred thousand. Despite Schwyzer's persistent smear campaign against outspoken feminist bloggers of color, white cyberfeminists helped Hugo Schwyzer, a self-declared “ally” of feminism, build his platform and access to major feminist digital media outlets. Kendall (2013) wanted a Twitter shorthand to stand for how often feminists of color are told that racism “isn't a feminist issue.” She wanted it to initiate a discussion between people impacted by Schwyzer's bullying and white feminist complicity with it.
Unexpectedly, the hashtag became a huge success on Twitter, expanding on other social media and inspiring further initiatives taking issue with other intersectional erasures, for example, Lemieux's #BlackPowerIsForBlackMen targeted (hetero)sexism and misogyny that black women face within black male-led social movements; the hashtag #NotYourNarrative started by Rania Khalek and Roqayah Chamseddine to criticize western media's portrayal of Muslim women; or #NotYourAsianSidekick launched by Suey Park in support of Asian-American feminism. Park affirms having started the hashtag because she is “tired of the patriarchy in Asian-American spaces and sick of the racism in white feminism.” Clearly, the reasons behind the launching of these hashtags resemble the catalysts that encouraged the Combahee River Collective and Afro-Brazilian women to ground a movement in collective identity politics.
As these cases illustrate, social media-savvy young feminists of color increasingly use intersectional frameworks to challenge various forms of the intermeshed oppressions they face. Intersectionality has become for many contemporary black feminists “the primary tool through which we articulate our understanding of how social inequalities are created and sustained, a key concern being that such an analysis should become normative practice for the wider movement rather than a niche concern of a minority constituency” (Okolosie 2014: 90). Social media, particularly Twitter and the feminist blogosphere, play an important role by providing platforms for feminists of color who hitherto rarely had access to larger audiences. Gaining popularity on social media can also prompt the careers of these black feminist bloggers, helping them publish in more traditional venues.
As exemplified by these debates, intersectionality's increasing and often contested visibility on social media provides important opportunities to examine intersections of class, race, sexuality, gender, and age in action. If the innovation and popularization of ICTs have transformed feminism by increasing young women's participation in digital feminist activism and media-content production, the questions of who among digital feminist activists has access to major social media outlets, who is authorized, who is disenfranchised as divisive, or elitist, or unhelpful to the feminist cause, suggest enduring racialized power dynamics. Certainly, intersectionality has notable social media presence, or to borrow the title of a Ms Magazine article: “Social media minds the intersectional gap” (August 16, 2013). Yet the resistance, even downright hostility, which some white feminists express toward intersectionality in the name of populism or socialism indicates a tricky interaction wherein racism masquerades as class politics.
It would be a major mistake to look at only formal venues, such as human rights or similar public policy venues, or the academic journals and conferences of higher education, to assess the actual and potential impact of intersectionality's dispersal. Intersectionality's digital vitality provides ample evidence of its significant appeal and utility to a new generation of people who face multiple marginalization, but who have access to and skills in ICTs. Online communities of color, most often women, queer, and trans people of color, constitute an important force in contributing to intersectionality's digital vitality. The people and communities who were historically most disenfranchised within US social institutions were the same people who facilitated intersectionality's emergence. In the same way, and perhaps building on this legacy, the very same individuals and groups who face discrimination and injustice in a global context criticize contemporary social injustice. And they are making this happen by relying to a large extent on their skilful use of new digital media.